This stellar collection of Paul Craig Roberts’s essays dating from February, 2014 explores the extreme dangers in Washington’s imposition of vassalage on other countries and Washington’s resurrection of distrust among nuclear powers, the very distrust that Reagan and Gorbachev worked to eliminate.

Roberts explains how the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed the only check on Washington’s ability to act unilaterally. The United States’ position as the sole remaining superpower led to the euphoric proclamation of “the end of history” and to Washington’s presumption of the victory of “American democratic-capitalism” over all other systems.

The neoconservatives became entrenched in successive American administrations, both Republican and Democratic. Their ideology of U.S. global hegemony—the doctrine that no other power will be allowed to arise that could constrain U.S. unilateral action—has become a foundational premise of U.S. foreign policy and has led to reckless intervention in Ukraine and an irresponsible assault on Russian national interest.

In pursuit of hegemony, Washington has expanded NATO to Russia’s border, instigated “color revolutions” in former constituent parts of the Soviet Union, announced a “pivot to Asia” to encircle China, orchestrated a coup in Ukraine, demonized Putin, and imposed warlike sanctions against Russia. These reckless and irresponsible actions have brought back the risk of nuclear war.

This succession of events has impelled Roberts—following an illustrious career in government, journalism and academia—to perform the clarifying function abandoned by the mainstream media of examining the agendas at work and the risks entailed. His insightful commentary is followed all over the world. In February 2015, Roberts was invited to address a major International conference in Moscow hosted by Institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Moscow State Institute of International Relations, where he delivered the address which is the title of this book.

In Roberts’ assessment, Washington’s drive for hegemony is not only unnecessary but unrealistic and filled with peril for Americans and the world at large. This book is a call to awareness that ignorance and propaganda are leading the world toward unspeakable disaster.

Softcover, 308 pages

“I was associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. I was BusinessWeek’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for The Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to The New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times.

Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.” For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in The New York Timesappeared in January, 2004, coauthored with U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-SPAN. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at The Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a BusinessWeek columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.”

— Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, member of the U.S. Congressional staff, associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and columnist forBusinessWeek, the Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has held academic appointments in six universities, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions. He is author or coauthor of 10 books and numerous articles in scholarly journals. Dr. Roberts was awarded the U.S. Treasury’s Meritorious Service Award for “outstanding contributions to the formulation of U.S. economic policy,” and France’s Legion of Honor as “the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism” by the government of Francois Mitterrand. He was educated at Georgia Tech, the University of Virginia, the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College. Earlier works were published by Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, Hoover Institution and Stanford University Press. Dr. Roberts is presently Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy.